What Does It Mean To Source Talent?

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Attracting the right candidates is essential to the future of every company. By developing a pipeline to source talent, an organization increases the chances of hiring the best candidates for their future growth. Having perfect candidates means lower employee turnover and great productivity. This is particularly true after the holidays and bonus season, the most popular period for changing jobs.

For many businesses, this means newly vacated positions and a great challenge of finding the right people to fill them. If done properly, a new employee will be a great asset and key to a company’s future success. Still, on the other hand, if done wrong, the unfit employee can harm the company culture and waste resources spent on training.

Hiring is a complicated task. A recruitment team must know how to engage candidates, but they also need to streamline the hiring process to target the best professionals for the position. That is why it is vital to develop a detailed strategy that targets the best candidates. This can include online recruitment initiatives, such as building a career page on a company’s website and promoting a company as an exciting place to work through online channels. It is also important to include offline recruitment methods, such as attending events to meet potential candidates in person and encouraging employee referrals. 

So, what does talent sourcing mean? Why is it important for a company to do talent sourcing? These and other questions will be answered in this blog post, so make sure to stick around! Ready to start? Contact CIBR Warriors for the fastest way to qualified employees!

What is Talent Sourcing?

To find the right candidates, a company must first determine what would best represent them and propel them forward. In order to do that, they need to practice some talent sourcing. However, with such fierce competition on the market, only companies with a clear and effective strategy can succeed. A good talent sourcing strategy starts with knowing where to find, or ‘to source,’ the best candidates.

Therefore, talent sourcing is a process of identifying, generating, locating, researching, and networking with potential candidates in order to convert them into job applicants. Every part of this five-step process is jointly done to determine where the best candidate pipeline is for any type of job. For instance, depending on the industry, some companies have a lot of use from traditional job fairs, while others need to target passive candidates, which means they look for individuals who may not be actively looking for a new job.

Once you’ve created a talent pool from your sourcing efforts, you can start to narrow down potential top candidates for the next phase in the hiring process. Talent sourcing can be done in several ways, either through traditional or online advertising, networking in specific communities, or referral programs through your current employees.

What is the Goal of Talent Sourcing?

On a broader scale, talent sourcing aims to create a consistent flow of highly-skilled applicants. From a purely technical sense, talent sourcing is like looking for the diamonds in the rough. The aim is to turn the top candidates into applicants.

These may be highly qualified people, but they are not looking or are unaware of the hiring opportunities. They can also be potential hires who are a culturally great fit with some or most of the competencies but come from an unusual location or background. In such highly technical jobs that ask for specific skills like nursing, programming, or IT, talent sourcing is especially important.

What is the Difference Between Talent Sourcing and Recruiting?

The goal of talent sourcing, at its most basic level, is to turn non-applications into applicants. Recruitment, on the other hand, converts applicants into employees. Therefore, talent sourcing is the starting point of the recruitment process and a vital element of building a strong talent pipeline.

Although talent sourcing and recruiting go hand-in-hand, there are several important distinctions. Most recruiters find talent through a variety of sources, including job boards and LinkedIn, managing the recruiting process from end-to-end and interacting with talent sourcers when needed. Talent sourcers, on the other hand, focus on generating leads for a small number of assigned requisitions, working closely with recruiters and hiring managers. They have to search for and identify talent, generate leads, and build interest in available job positions.

The Process of Sourcing Talent

Every company must develop its own talent sourcing process to suit its needs. With that in mind, there are several basic steps to the talent sourcing process:

1. Create the Job Position

It is essential that you know everything about the job position you are looking to fill; otherwise, finding the best candidate will be impossible. When creating the job position, try to ask these questions: What do you expect of them? Are there hard or soft skills they must possess before they can start working? Such questions will help you create a detailed and effective job description that will only attract candidates who can satisfy your requirements.

2. Create an Ideal Candidate Persona

After you have created the position, now it’s time to think of your ideal hire. A candidate persona is a written description of the best person to take the job position. How competent are they? What will they bring to the table? Do they agree with the company culture? Such questions should serve you in creating a blueprint of the perfect hire. During this process, you will want to think about the locations, channels, websites, and platforms your ideal hire frequents.

3. Identify the Best Candidate

Now it is time to go out and get your best candidates. Although LinkedIn is very useful, this is not the only place to look for a hire. Why? Because digital talent is moving onto specific platforms where they can interact with other like-minded professionals and hone their skills. Depending on your industry, make sure to check out such channels as Kaggle, GitHub, Stack Overflow, or AngelList.

4. Contact Candidates

The most important thing here is the first impression. Take your time and type up a clear, direct, and a personalized message relevant to their situation. According to Forbes, this is the new reality for talent recruitment, where top talent is expecting a personalized outreach. If you don’t hear from them right away, don’t stress, shoot up a couple of follow-ups their way. Sometimes a worthy hire will need a little prompting.

5. Interview and Assess

This is usually the last step in the process of a talent sourcer. They will provide you with enough information so that you can narrow down the best potential hires. This is where you can either involve yourself in the interview process or delegate it to your recruiters and hiring managers.

6. Hiring and Onboarding

Once you’ve made the final decision, it is time to send the offer, set on the specifics of the job, and officially get the new employee on staff. If the previous steps are properly done, the hiring and onboarding should go smoothly.

7. Feedback

This step is generally overlooked but is vital. Make sure to ask your new hire how the hiring process was for them. Did you do a good job of matching the job position with them? What could be improved? How did you represent your brand? Based on this information, you can adjust your future processes and move on.

Conclusion

Talent sourcing is the most important step in bringing the best of the best talent into your organization. A good talent sourcing team can cultivate a steady stream of high-quality potential candidates that will remain engaged and interested in joining your company. If you create a clear talent sourcing process, utilize best practices, and continuously search for ways to revise your hiring strategy, you will maximize the value and benefit of your talent sourcing operation.

These are the times where you simply can not afford not to attract professionals to your company. This can be guaranteed with a specialist recruitment agency that knows where and how to find scarce talent and get them interested in your job position.

Hundreds of new candidates are looking for job openings every day, and CIBR Warriors are there to help you find the right one for you. For more help on advancing your career or finding a perfect candidate in IT and Cybersecurity, contact us. We’d be happy to answer your questions and provide you with the best advice for getting started.

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